Over the last decade, the development of small vehicles such as unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), micro-robots, and micro-satellites compelled the providers to develop smaller, lighter, and lower power consumption components as these small vehicles are limited to mass, volume and power consumption. As a result, the attitude control system of these small vehicles is also needed to be miniaturized. For space-based systems, the major drivers are power, size, mass and reliability in the space environment. This is associated with an increasing necessity for compact, low-power inertial navigation systems. Current technologies consist of various sensors and processors that are not optimized to operate together. For example, optical sensing systems often operate on the principle of shifting wavelengths, necessitating the use of a laser illumination system and a complicated and expensive optical spectrum analyzer (OSA). This is costly and requires a considerable reduction of the mass and power resources available on a small system.
As such, there has developed a desire to obtain highly sensitive, low cost in-plane accelerometers and rotational rate sensors (gyroscopes) on a single substrate (chip) to enable the integration of an array of these sensors as three-axis sensor on a single platform, where the components have been optimized relative to their size, design, and fabrication process.